| From: | Paul J. Adam Shadowtk@********.demon.co.uk |
|---|---|
| Subject: | Entry Team (5) |
| Date: | Fri, 4 Jun 1999 19:48:26 +0100 |
>>>>>[TO: D J H Coppinger, Director
Lilith is still indisposed. She'll be walking bowlegged for days at this rate...
<salacious chuckle>
Since she's not around to do it, I thought you'd like the footage from our
raid.
+++++begin simsense recording
The accomodation block is dark and quiet, only the battery-powered
emergency lights operating. Its corridors are ominously empty, the air hot
and humid.
Intelligence data, the food consumed, the traffic on and off the supply
helicopters, indicated over four hundred occupants: yet the place is as
silent and apparently empty as a cemetery.
"What _did_ you do here, Lilith?" the Dark Stranger asks softly. He's
braced in an intersection, covering the corridor, as Lilith passes: a woman
in coveralls lies half-in half-out of one doorway, arched and stretched out,
face distorted in a frozen mask of terror, fresh blood still trickling from
her lips.
"You remember I offered you some nerve gas?" Lilith replies, equally
quietly. "We used some here. Flooded the ventilation system with Triple
Nickel."
She passes Emma and Quinn, checks an open door: inside, a naked man
lies in the same twisted pose, spilling out of a closet. Huntingdon's chorea,
the final extremis caused by cholinesterase inhibitors as the body's muscles
go into spasm, and the stronger extensors win over the weaker flexors.
The dead man had been trying to seal his closet's door with duct tape, it
seems, in a desperate bid to cheat death.
"How safe is this?" Easy asks, a slight nervous edge in her voice.
"Five-Five-Five hydrolyses fast in air. Dispersed as a gas, it's only lethal for
ten, twelve minutes at room temperature. In this heat? Half that."
"Okay. But pardon my curiosity..." Easy doesn't let the conversation
interfere with her movements, as she moves from the back of the group
to its front, checking and then covering the door to what might be the
messhall. "How in the name of all that doesn't suck did you get it in here,
and how come it got set off so conveniently, right as we arrived?"
"Trade secrets." Lilith smirks, as Mani moves forward (the group
executing a perfect 'caterpillar' advance down the corridors). She sees
Easy's scowl, decides to continue. "Seriously, though, we've been staking
this place out since we found it. When one of their air conditioning
modules went down, we, uh, modified the replacement before it was
delivered. Who ever does a teardown check on a sealed-unit steam
humidifier?"
The shapeshifter glances past Easy into the mess hall: over a dozen
sprawled bodies lie amidst overturned tables and spilt food. The muzzle of
the MC71 traces from body to body, across the doors, sees no threats.
"But when it got the right radio code, that module stopped rehumidifying
the air with water vapour, and saturated it with Triple Nickel instead.
Two minutes later it's been pumped all around the interior of this block in
lethal concentration, and it's _adios muchachos, amigos_." She regards the
elevators with suspicion, tries the door to the stairwell: it swings open
easily, revealing simple steel emergency stairs lit by the same yellowish
battery lamps.
"There's more going on here than you're admitting to. Much more." The
Dark Stranger passes Lilith, descending to the first landing, his Alpha at
high port.
Lilith's smirk is as feline as a shapeshifter's should be: the look of a cat
who's sure it knows more than you. "Isn't there always, Stranger?"
"Of course. Like, the fact we know exactly where to go within this
building? We're ignoring the bottom levels? We seem to be expected?"
"Advanced strategic reconnaisance systems. Satellite data. Maps drawn in
sheep's entrails and goat blood." Lilith replies, still smirking, as the rest of
the team flow past: boots ringing on the pressed steel, weapons still
probing for targets. "Sometimes you just have to trust your allies."
The Dark Stranger shrugs. "I hope you're right, Lilith..."
"We're all dead if we aren't." she says softly.
One landing down, and no further descent is possible: the doors to this
level are dark wood, and halfway down the next flight the stairway is
sealed off by heavy steel doors. Smoke wisps out through the tiny gaps,
and the heat coming off them is noticeable even in Lilith's baseline trode-
recording.
She spares them barely a glance, more interested in the faint echoes of
gunfire. Light typewriter chatter, <taktaktaktak>, answered by a deeper,
slower <tocktock tock>, almost in waltz time, direction and distance lost
in the maze that's the inside of the ancient oil platform.
"Trouble?" Easy asks.
"A little internal dissent." Lilith replies, smiling. "Always a problem.
Cabin
fever, maybe." A glance to be sure everyone is in place, and she throws
the doors open. One sticks and she throws her full weight against it,
knocking it wide.
Around them and through, into richly carpeted comfort, walls covered
with fabric hangings, and all lit only by the weak yellow glow of battery
lights. Two respirator-clad men lie dead by the doors, one pushed
sideways by her shove: one of them killed by three deep cuts to his
throat, the other blasted in the face by a shotgun point-blank that blew a
fist-size hole in both gasmask and face. Neither is a pretty sight.
"Cabin fever, my arse." Quinn mutters, her SPAS-22 aimed down the
corridor: in the distance, the typewriters are weakening, while the deeper
gunshots - still, often, in that odd waltz beat - continue. A deep
concussion is more felt through the floor, than heard.
"Good enough. Move out." Lilith leads off, and again the team make their
rapid caterpillar advance through the corridors: this level is still mostly
occupied by corpses dead in mid-spasm, but there are signs of a conflict.
Occasional bullet holes and scars in the walls, a half-naked man (wearing
only underpants and a gasmask) lying at an intersection, two holes in his
chest and a third in his head. Long brass cases glitter in the bad light:
Emma pauses, examining one, before Lilith brings the group to a
(cautious, deployed) halt by a heavy steel door.
"We need this open." She says, studying the steel shutters.
"Doable." Emma replies, going to work on the locking mechanism with a
small electronics kit. "Two minutes."
Lilith cocks her head, listening. The gunfire is closer, if more sporadic:
but now an occasional trembling vibration can be felt through the decking
now. "Work fast." is all she says.
+++++end simsense
And now, a few messages from our sponsors...]<<<<<
-- The Mighty Quinn <19:48:46/06-04-60>
